In engineering practice, a problem is quite often faced in which the number of unknown parameters exceeds the number of conditions or requirements or, otherwise, there are too many requirements for too few parameters to design. Such under- or over-defined tasks are sometimes not possible to solve using a direct approach. The number of solutions to such problems is multiple, and it is most rational to search for the optimal one by numerical methods since the more unknown design parameters there are to be designed, the more potential solutions there are. This article discusses a way to find an optimal solution to such an underdetermined problem by heuristic optimization methods on the basis of the example of designing a composite wing skin of an aircraft. Several heuristic approaches, specifically gradient descent and Tabu search, are studied to solve the design problem and to locate an optimal solution. They are also compared to a conventional direct approach. The examined composite lamina is optimized by the target function of minimum weight with the constraints of strength and buckling failure criteria. In most of the observed cases, the heuristic method designed structures which were considerably better than the structures that were obtained by conventional direct approaches in terms of the weight to load ratio.
Keywords: composite material; heuristic optimization; tabu search.